How were the bandings for living accommodation expenditure determined?
The bands were set based on information provided by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) (and Northern Irish equivalent) as to reasonable rental costs for a one bedroom property across the UK. On a monthly basis the VOA and the Northern Irish Housing Executive (NIHE) publish data on Local Reference Rents, or LRRs, for various types of property, by 200 large geographical areas called “Broad Rental Market Areas” or BRMAs. The data includes an LRR which is the mid-point between (in the rent officer’s opinion) are the highest and lowest non-exceptional rents in a given locality. IPSA took the highest weekly rent that the VOA would consider “non-exceptional” for each BRMA, using the March 2010 data for a property containing one bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. The Parliamentary boundaries were then mapped onto these BRMAs, to find the BRMA which most closely matched each individual constituency. In constituencies which spread across more than one BRMA, whichever BRMA covered the mos
